Renmark Hotel on River Murray first in the British empire to be community owned on Gothenburg system
The heritage-listed art deco Renmark Hotel followed a system adopted by the Swedish city of Gothenburg in being community owned and run.
Renmark Hotel, on the River Murray banks in South Australia, was the first in the British empire to be community owned from 1897. The heritage-listed art deco hotel, managed by a community-elected board, continued to return its profits to the town via donations and sponsorships in the 21st Century.
Renmark’s community hotel followed a system started by Sweden’s second city Gothenburg to confront its 19th Century drinking problem. Its guiding principle was to disconnect the sale of alcohol from the profit motive. Licensed outlets, owned by semi-private trust, were to be run by “disinterested” and salaried managers who had no pecuniary interest in pushing alcohol sales.
Several South Australian and local factors played into Renmark getting its community hotel. The colony’s strong nonconformist Christianity element (with a temperance attitude to alcohol) fed into self help and communal agricultural settlement, especially along the Murray River.
Renmark was part of a pioneering Murray River irrigation colony started in 1887 by two Canadian irrigators, brothers George and W.B. Chaffey. Both were teetotallers. The South Australian government gave the Chaffeys the right to use 100,000 hectares north of the river to set up an irrigation system with private capital, enabling them to start a colony of like-minded people.
The Chaffey brothers and local residents wanted Renmark area to be alcohol dry and advertised it to intending settlers. In 1891, the South Australian Licensed Victuallers Act was changed to allow the Chaffey brothers’ colony to be dry. The Victorian government did the same for the Chaffey’s nearby colony at Mildura. Renmark and Mildura (and many other towns, particularly in Victoria) already had unlicensed temperance hotels offering board and lodging but no alcohol.
Influenced by the temperance movement, these hotels were often coffee palaces with grand facades and fittings to compete with the taverns. Their popularity declined as residents agitated for licensed premises. After several years, Renmark’s prohibition was deemed a failure because it didn’t stop sly grog flowing on paddle steamers, creating “a club under every ti-tree”.
In 1895, the Renmark Pioneer editor Chris Ashwell wrote about the sly grog trade and argued the Gothenburg system, being debated in Mildura, could be adopted in Renmark “without laying ourselves open to the charge of running counter to temperance principles”. The newspaper ran arguments for and against a licensed hotel. Methodist pastor W. Corly Butler insisted it would be foolish to reverse the “dry” status but another correspondent said there was far less drunkenness in a towns with a well-conducted hotel, supervised by police, than when it was prohibited; a man who could get an occasional drink at reasonable hours “would be much less likely to make a beast of himself”.
A Renmark Local Progress Committee was formed to pursue the community hotel idea and the South Australian Licensed Victuallers Act was changed to allow a publican’s licence to be granted for a community-run business, if most local householders signed a petition seeking it. There was a counter petition but the vote was carried. Despite his misgivings, Butler signed the petition, believing anything was better than sly grog.
Jane Meissner, who’d owned the town’s temperance hotel since 1892, agreed to sell her business and was first manager of the licensed Renmark Community Hotel, funded by a local station owner, in 1897. It was the only legitimate liquor outlet in an otherwise dry district covering several thousand square kilometres of South Australia. The sly grog shops reportedly closed immediately. The first chairman of the hotel committee was an Anglican clergyman.